Zack Snyder and HBO Are Considering a Watchmen TV Series

Sometimes, it is hard to tell if something is a good or bad idea just by reading about it on the Internet. Take this, for example: According to Collider, HBO has begun preliminary discussions with director Zack Snyder about bringing a Watchmen TV series to the network.

Like most things involving superheroes and premium cable, you might feel like you are supposed to have an opinion about this—even though "preliminary discussions," by definition, mean that no deal has taken place, and Collider is, rightly, pretty frank about HBO's tendency to abandon projects all the time. But still, is Watchmen even a good idea? Reception to the 2009 film was kind of...tepid. And asking the same guy who made the movie to develop the series is a curious choice.

But maybe it's not a terrible idea. Watchmen is widely considered one of the most important comics ever made, an R-rated deconstruction of superheroes and the medium they spawned from. No matter how good an adaptation of it is, it will always lose something from jumping to another medium. That's a part of the problem with the movie—it was too faithful to the comic, not really adjusting for that shift in medium.

Its big problem was context: Again, Watchmen is a deconstruction of comic book superheroes, and when the film came out in 2009, superhero movies were very much on the rise but nowhere near the level of saturation we're at now. There simply wasn't much to deconstruct; the movie simply arrived too early. So it was written off by people who might respond most strongly to it—ideally, anyone feeling tired or overwhelmed by all the superhero adaptations in movie theaters every year.

An HBO series could correct for these two big stumbles. While Watchmen is most widely read as a single graphic novel, it was originally serialized across twelve issues from the fall of 1986 until 1987. Adapting it as serial television could help counter the arduousness of the film, because Watchmen is weighty stuff (there are also a bunch of prequel comics released in 2012 that could be explored, but maybe it's better if for the moment we forget those) . Also, by the time it makes it to air, there will be far more superhero projects released than there were in 2009, and therefore more works for Watchmen to stand in contrast to.

And then there's director Zack Snyder's proposed involvement. Although his Watchmen film has its fair share of problems, it is probably the best one we could have gotten thanks to its slavish devotion to the source material—many, many shots in the movie were lifted directly from the comic book. However, Snyder hasn't really done anything to prove he's much more than a gifted visual stylist, and whenever he veers away into original territory (Man of Steel, Sucker Punch) things get pretty hairy. Even when he does play by the book, he still makes some choices that lead to things like the worst sex scene of 2009.

A Watchmen TV series, in the near future, might be good. Might be bad. Might not even happen. If it does, though, things could get wild, given the network's interest in portraying actors fully nude in "a table-like shape".